Slapping the Bass: Fred Maddox, Marshall Lytle, Bill Black

There is a moment in the account of a Memphis session in July 1954 where a bass player stops waiting and starts hitting his instrument.

`Bill jumped up and started slapping his bass in time to the music. Then Scotty joined in on electric guitar.`

That sentence comes from an essay written for the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry. It describes the act rather than explaining it. What follows is what can be established about three bass players, what can be dated about each of them, and what cannot.

What the trade papers called it, and what they did not

The weeklies that reviewed and charted these records had a name for the instrument. `Bass fiddle` turns up as a matter of routine in their personnel listings — `Stills, bass fiddle`; `vocalist, bass fiddle and straights` — and Billboard used it in December 1955 when it reported that RCA Victor intended to keep recording Elvis Presley `with the same backing — electric guitar, bass fiddle, drums and Presley himself on rhythm guitar`.

What those pages do not do is describe how the instrument was played. In Billboard's pages of those years, the word `slap` turns up as `slapstick`, as a charge `slapped on` someone, and once as a song title. Those trade-paper pages name the instrument but do not describe the technique. The descriptions that follow come from later testimony and from retrospective institutional accounts.

Fred Maddox, and the limits of a date

The Maddox family left Boaz, Alabama, in 1933 and hitchhiked west, ending up in California's San Joaquin Valley. The booklet Chris Strachwitz wrote for Arhoolie's reissue of the band's early sides records that `in 1937 the Maddox Brothers and Rose began performing over` local radio, that in 1939 they appeared as part of the California State Centennial Festival in Sacramento, and that in 1941 the brothers were drafted. It lists the band's instruments — `mandolin, guitar, harmonica, bass and fiddle` — and it names the man holding one of them: `Fred Maddox - bass and lead vocals`.

So Fred Maddox can be placed on the bass, in that band, from 1937.

What cannot be placed there is the technique. That booklet runs to some 2,700 words and does not use the word `slap` once. The association comes from somewhere else: the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, describing the group, writes that they built their reputation on a stage act that `blended slap-bass hillbilly boogie, honky-tonk, western swing, old-time music, comedy, and magic tricks`.

Those are two different statements in two different sources. One dates the band; the other describes what the band became known for, without saying from when. Putting them together produces a sentence neither of them makes — that Fred Maddox was slapping a bass in 1937 — and that sentence is not written here.

Marshall Lytle, and a technique passed on

The clearest account of the technique moving from one player to another comes from Marshall Lytle, who played bass with Bill Haley from 1951, interviewed in 2010 by Djordje Stijepovic.

`Bill Haley learned the slap technique in the mid 1940's when he was part of a country group called the Down Homers. Bill taught me the basics and I created something that worked for me called the Country Shuffle Boogie Beat.`

Two things in that sentence are worth keeping exactly as he put them. The date is approximate — `the mid 1940's`, not a year — and the thing he built out of Haley's basics he names without explaining it. Country Shuffle Boogie Beat is what Lytle called his own playing; the interview does not say what it consisted of, and no description of it is attempted here.

Lytle also leaves something more unusual: the conditions. Asked how his bass was recorded for the Comets' Decca sessions, he answered `We used two mics, one on the fingerboard and one on the F-hole. I don't know which ones. Decca had the best.` Two microphones on one instrument, one at the neck and one at the body — a detail that belongs to those sessions and to no others.

Asked what amplification he used on stage in the 1950s, his answer was shorter: `Didn't have any, that's why I bled a lot!`

And when the Comets took on a drummer, he did not adjust: `I never changed my style, but I was able to relax a lot more because of the full sound.`

Bill Black, and what a bandmate said it was for

For Bill Black there is no equivalent interview. What there is instead is the man standing next to him.

Asked whether he and Black had worked out the rhythm of Mystery Train or fallen into it, Scotty Moore described the second:

`Bill would just naturally fall in and slap bass and, you know, put the rhythm in there.`

And then a second remark that says more about how they worked than any account of technique could:

`He might not hit every note dead on, but that rhythm would always be there. We always went for feel. If it felt good, if there was some little bauble or something, the note wasn't quite true or something, it didn't matter…`

That is the only statement of purpose any of these sources contains, and it belongs to one player describing another. For Moore, the rhythm and the feel mattered even when a note was not quite true.

Three players, three kinds of evidence

Set side by side, the three do not produce a lineage. They produce three different kinds of record.

Fred Maddox is documented as a bassist, with dates, by a booklet that never mentions how he played. Marshall Lytle documented himself, decades later, and is the only one of the three to leave both a chain of transmission and the physical conditions of a session. Bill Black left neither, and survives here through a sentence about a July afternoon and a bandmate's recollection of what his playing did.

Claims that Black modelled himself on Maddox circulate widely. They are not repeated here: the accounts that carry them trace back to derived text rather than to anything either man said.

`Bass fiddle` was ordinary terminology in the trade press, used without being glossed. The evidence for the slap is far less even: one dated session, later recollections of how the technique was passed on and what it was for, and a retrospective description that cannot itself date the practice.

A note on sources

The July 1954 session. Sun Records Sessions — Elvis Presley (1954-1955), an essay for the National Recording Registry hosted by the Library of Congress. It is signed by James L. Dickerson, co-author of two books with Scotty Moore, and carries the Library's notice that the views in it are the author's.
Scotty Moore, interviewed by Terry Gross in 1997; the transcript quoted here is Fresh Air's archive edition of 16 August 2002, which rebroadcasts that conversation. A participant's recollection, given decades after the sessions.
Marshall Lytle, interviewed by Djordje Stijepovic, Art of Slap Bass, 2 September 2010. In that interview the interviewer's questions propose more than the answers confirm — one asks Lytle to accept that he was `the main groove keeper` before the Comets had a drummer, and his reply neither says so nor implies it. Only his answers are quoted above.
The Maddox Brothers & Rose. Booklet by Chris Strachwitz for the Arhoolie reissue The Maddox Brothers & Rose, Vol. 1, hosted by Smithsonian Folkways, for the family's move west in 1933, the dates and the personnel; and the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's description of the group for the phrase `slap-bass hillbilly boogie`. The two are cited separately because they establish different things, and neither dates the technique.
The trade press. A sample of Billboard and Cash Box issues between 1948 and 1956, from the World Radio History archive, supplies `bass fiddle`, the December 1955 report on Presley's backing, and the uses of `slap` quoted above. They describe records without describing how they were played, and searching that archive for the vocabulary of the technique returns nothing from the period.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's page on Bill Haley, inducted in 1987, names no members of the Comets and does not mention the bass.